Baftas 2017: La La Land wins modestly in a night of variety

With its explicit leaning towards favouring British films, the Baftas have never been considered a dry-run for the Oscars. Nevertheless, there was some surprise when La La Land – widely tipped as an Oscars frontrunner – only came away with five awards last night at the Royal Albert Hall ceremony. True, winning Best Film, Director, Actress, Music and Cinematography was not to be sniffed at, but the ceremony still offered up numerous surprises. Many films thought to be unlikely awards contenders – Jackie, Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge – were given one award each. And while many expected Casey Affleck to take home Best Actor, few predicted that Kenneth Lonergan would beat Damien Chazelle for his moving blue-collar drama Manchester By the Sea.

Some surprises, however, were less welcome. While Dev Patel deserved recognition for his work in Lion, there is something disappointing about Moonlight being denied its most viable award, for Mahershala Ali’s sensitive supporting role – which therefore shut the film out of awards conversation entirely.

Yet the evening maintained a generally upbeat tone. Ken Loach won the outstanding British film award for I, Daniel Blake, and used his speech to argue “that the most vulnerable and poorest people are treated by this government with a contempt and a callous brutality that is disgraceful…it is a brutality that extends to keeping out refugee children we promised to help.”

There were multiple digs at Donald Trump, both explicit and implicit, and references to last year’s controversy over diversity. Viola Davis, as expected, won the Best Supporting Actress award for Fences, though later expressed some trepidation over the ongoing issue of diversity: “I believe what still is a deficiency is that we have one year a plethora of American-American movies and then the next year nothing.”

The evening concluded with a fellowship issued to Mel Brooks, who said of the UK: “I don’t think of England as a foreign country, I think of it as a vast Brooklyn, which just speaks better.”